Liberal Conspiracy is publishing a series of discussions about the government’s Community Empowerment White Paper. Hazel Blears said blogs are not constructive enough; this is the first such project where readers have volunteered to review different parts of the paper. Consultation on this paper is due to end soon.

I’ve been asked to kick off with an overview of the principles which inform the strategy. Other authors are covering the points related to particular chapters and local authorities.

The aim of the white paper is “to pass power into the hands of local communities so as to generate vibrant local democracy in every part of the country and give real control over local decisions and services to a wider pool of active citizens.”

Unlike some government white papers, there is no ‘one big idea’ in the white paper, for better and for worse. Instead there are lots of smaller ideas, which are grouped under the headings of being an active citizen, accessing information, influencing local decision-making, holding decision-makers to account, getting redress when things go wrong, standing for office and community ownership and management of local services.

The white paper claims to be ‘part of a process’, building on ten years of devolution from the Scottish Parliament and Welsh and London Assemblies, and the establishment of NHS Foundation Trusts. Perhaps more convincingly, it also notes that people’s expectations of services and the ways that they access information has changed, and democracy and public services need to respond to this.

As a result, most of the concrete proposals in the white paper follow a kind of ‘consumer rights’ model of empowerment, which is about the relationship between individuals and the state. Non-state organisations such as voluntary and community groups and political parties are mentioned, but there is relatively little in the paper which will give them new powers to help involve people, although there are some measures which may give them more opportunities to run local services. Local ‘communities’ are frequently referred to, but I couldn’t find anywhere where an attempt was made to define what is meant by a ‘community’.

The theory of change underpinning this approach is that there are large numbers of people in local communities who want to make a difference but are currently being prevented by unresponsive and bureaucratic structures. The white paper calls for elected mayors to run authorities, and local councillors with much greater powers to influence services in the area which they represent (I disagree with the former, and agree with the latter).

People should be able to find out information about local services more easily, and participate as individuals in determining spending priorities through participatory budgeting and demanding better services through petitions.

Local councils will have new duties to promote democracy, show that they have involved people in their decisions and give non-government groups more opportunities to run services. And our old friend ‘rights and responsibilities’ makes a tentative appearance, with the idea that “communities” could gain the right to new services in exchange for signing up to new responsibilities.

It’s hard to argue that the current system is so fantastic that there is nothing of merit in any of these ideas. And the insight that better decisions are made when the people who are affected by them are involved in making them is surely correct. But the ‘consumer rights’ approach does also have its limitations.

It’s an important principle that the ‘right to participate’ should be equally available to all - not just people with internet access, the time to turn up to public meetings or the skills and confidence to demand action on what they think is most important.

Otherwise the result is to ‘empower the already empowered’. Enabling wider participation in decision-making is more expensive and time-consuming than the current ways in which decisions are made, for all the other benefits it brings.

Participation and new forms of community empowerment can serve either to reinforce or to reduce inequalities of power, and it is absolutely crucial that the measures which the government ends up supporting and which we discuss and call for do the latter, not the former.